8 - Home and profession in black feminism

Summary

I think that a whole lot of what's going on in my work is a kind of theorizing through autobiography or through storytelling.

bell hooks

Only the [black] female stands in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed. This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject. Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to “name”) … might rewrite after all a radically different text for female empowerment.

Hortense Spillers

In fact, not play, the absence of black women from any kind of romantic or professional archetype is a complicated phenomenon.

Patricia Williams

Gemini opens by challenging “the negative relationship between the artist and home,” a relationship which the last pages indicate could be rethought with a healthy dose of black women's self-identity; Angela Davis provides the image of a black woman as political worker who articulates the whole world as her home in a way that is historically improbable – though Hurston's anthropology indicates that a rather different version of it was not impossible – prior to Black Power. Neither phrases the problematic of home as specific to black women: Giovanni's category is the artist, while Davis makes clear that political participation is in the very act of travel.